Edgar Purdom, a furniture store owner in Wayah Valley, near Franklin, practiced photography for 20 years after World War II, producing exquisite images of nature and of people at their trades. Western Carolina University holds 56 of the photographs in Hunter Library’s Special Collections. “Apple” starts a smart Appalachian ABC, for the fruit, reputedly brought by the Spanish in the 1500s, became a staple at home and in markets, from the time of Cherokee orchards to Silas McDowell and Jarvis van Buren, mountain pomologists, who obtained seedlings from the Cherokee in the wake of their expulsion. “It may be a twisted irony,” the author of “Uncle Jim’s Cider Press” at the Appalachian Institute for Mountain Studies comments, “that many of the varieties developed by the Cherokee survive today because of these men.”

Pies, cider, pigs, cellar, orchard, October: These are some of the associations a mountain child had with apples, grown scientifically in several varieties for different best uses. Nor can one omit the Appalachian stack cake, described by Our State magazine in 2014 as “many thin layers of sorghum-sweetened cake married together by thick, fragrant filling made from dried apples.” This image is the second of 10 celebrating WCU’s Special Collections, part of a larger series about archives in our region. To learn more, visit wcudigitalcollection.cdmhost.com.